@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
dlowan wrote:Well, if it is not a reinstitution of properly constituted tribunals, with due process etc I would agree with Thomas.
But I am not sure why people are making the assumption that what Obama proposes is pretty much the same as the Bush things.
What do you mean by the "re" in "reinstitution"? There never have been any properly constituted tribunals to deal with alleged terrorist caught in the ill-defined battlefield in the vaguely defined war on terror. These tribunals were coughed up on the fly,
after the alleged offenders were caught and locked up. Their rules were made up as the process went along, depending on what was politically convenient at the time, and what the courts would let the government get away with. This is screwed up, and this alone dooms the military tribunals to be kangaroo courts.
And we appear to be stuck with them, now that Obama has taken the option of non-kangaroo courts off the table. Trying the alleged unlawful enemy combatants in federal courts is out. Trying them in court martials (which I personally consider the least bad compromise) is out. All we have is kangaroo courts, and Obama's promise to have them run by competent kangaroos, following proper kangaroo procedures.
Not good enough.
Perhaps not good enough for you, but evidently good enough for our new president and his predecessor.
Courts martial conducted under the U.S. Code of Military Justice, which was written to establish procedure and process for the trial of serving members of the United States Military, seem to be an inappropriate structure with which to deal with the ununiformed members of a supra national, largely terrorist movement conducting hostile actions against the United States and avowedly planning and threatening more.
The people in question were either captured on the battlefield in the course of combat operations or, in some cases, by covert agents of this country operating with the secret collusion and consent of nations otherwise unwilling to themeselves take any overt action against these people. The after-the-fact application of conventional rules of criminal justice in these situations (situations for which the rules in question were never intended) would make conviction impossible and would be an action without precedent in modern history (not to mention absurd).
However, there is long established legal precedent for military tribunals conducted under less restrictive rules, (particularly with respect to habeus corpus, certain rules of evidence, including heresay rules with respect to some forms of intelligence), which have been repeatefly used by this country, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain and all the previous European powere in their many wars. I have outlined some relevant previous uses of these tribunals by the US government -- there are many others, including many involving all of the major powers of Europe.
This is the vehicle which the now "universally loathed" Bush Administration chose for these cases. Now we see that it is also the chosen vehicle of the now "almost universally loved" Obama admininstration has also chosen.
You are course free to object and say that both choices are wrong. However, you don't have any moral or legal responsibility to the public with which to temper your rather self-righteous judgements, and you haven't offered us any workable alternatives. Moreover, in rejecting these actions, you are, in effect, repudiating an entire area of the historical norms for the behavior of states in the modern historical era. You are free to do that as well. However, it seems appropriate (to me at least) that you acknowledge that fact in your protestations; together with the fact that you haven't offered us any practical alternative.
All that considered, it seems to me that your criticisms aren't worth much.
